Tuesday, August 01, 2017

This is why I was always wondered if we should even have an IG's office

A top official at the city agency tasked with ferreting out
corruption in local government in New Orleans is herself facing
allegations of misconduct, leveled in a scathing internal report.

The
document accuses Assistant Inspector General Nadiene Van Dyke of
steering contracts to friends, altering the findings of reports to fit
“her personal agendas,” suggesting that receipts be falsified and
running off employees who raised questions about her behavior.

The
allegations against Van Dyke, who heads the agency’s Inspections and
Evaluations Division, echo the kinds of charges the Office of Inspector
General regularly levels against other city agencies.

At the end of the day, the office that is supposed to ferret out all the political corruption, is itself just another political office used for political.. and sometimes corrupt political.. purposes.

Much of the report focuses on Van Dyke’s relationship with Paula
Pendarvis, a media consultant hired by the office who is a personal
friend of Van Dyke’s. The contracts given to Pendarvis in recent years
add up to about $178,400 since 2014, some of which the report argues
amount to duplicative services. Contractors working for Pendarvis
received another $100,000.

Tim Meche, an attorney for Pendarvis,
said his client had not seen the report and denied that she had ever
been paid twice for the same work and said there was no case in which
she was paid for work she didn't do.

According to the report, Van
Dyke set up some of those contracts as cooperative endeavor agreements
rather than putting them out to bid so that the contracts could be given
to Pendarvis. The report says Van Dyke told an OIG employee who has
since left the office, “Paula’s my good friend, we go out to dinner all
the time, she does great work, and I’m going to give her a contract.”

And maybe that's kind of petty but that's also kind of the point. At its best, the IG's office discourages ethically questionable favoritism that sometimes may or may not lead to inefficient service delivery in government. In this case, though, we find it's actually participating in that.

At its worst, it inhibits oversight of police abuse.

The internal report also includes allegations from several current and
former employees that Van Dyke treated minorities in the office in a
demeaning manner. And it recounts clashes — some with racial overtones
— between Van Dyke and Independent Police Monitor Susan Hutson,
suggesting those conflicts planted the seeds for the feud that
ultimately led to the splitting of the two offices.